That structure can be printed more readibly with the FORMAT-DIFF function

(edit-distance:format-diff *path*)

Or, you can compute the diff and print it readably together by calling PRINT-DIFF:

(edit-distance:print-diff '(1 2 3 4 5) '(2 3 4 5 6))

which will print a result like this:

seq1: 1 2 3 4 5 *** []
seq2: *** 2 3 4 5 6 []

Several options are available to the FORMAT-DIFF and PRINT-DIFF to print a prefix and suffix for each line. Note that displaying substitutions relys on captialization and so substitutions are not visible for non-alphabetic sequence elements.

Additionally, other equality functions can be used, so this evaluates to a distance of zero: